Johannesburg - Hlengiwe Ngidi is among the South African black women who have worked hard to achieve their dreams in the business sector despite a challenging upbringing, and are always ready to help other people to achieve their wildest dreams.
Due to her passion for achieving big things, the education manager for L’Oréal Professional South Africa in Johannesburg, also runs her own lucrative hair academy and a wig manufacturing factory. Those who know her can attest to the fact that she has definitely made it big in the hairdressing industry.
During her high school years, the now sole owner of the International Wig and Beauty Academy (Iwaba) in Auckland Park, Johannesburg, was very different from most of her schoolmates because of her strict Christian background.
She passed her matric with flying colours and secured a bursary to study graphic design at the Durban University of Technology (DUT). She is currently studying trichology, which deals with hair loss and scalp disorder, at The Institute of Trichologists in London, Britain.
After receiving her diploma in 2001, she held various jobs but her dream was always to join the business world and become an employer instead of remaining an employee.
Through Iwaba which she opened in 2018, Ngidi gives people who have been retrenched, especially those affected by the Covid-19 meltdown, a second chance, helping to transform them into business owners.
“In 2020 and last year, I trained a lot of people from South African Airways, Eskom and Barloworld. Those were my main clients because they had lost their employment and they had money (retrenchment packages to pay for the training)” she said.
She boasts that her success rate in training people is about 90% because almost all of her trainees are now running their own wig manufacturing businesses either from home or by renting small spaces. Since 2020 when Covid-19 hit the world leading to massive retrenchments, Iwaba has trained about 680 people.
Each person is charged R9 000 for a five-day once-off course, but after completing their training, they get free sewing machines and contact with wig-making material suppliers “because I buy direct from China”.
“They are also buying directly from China. The only thing that you have to do to invest in yourself is coming to me for training.
“What is interesting is that it is a home-based business, you don’t need to rent premises although it is your choice to rent,” said Ngidi.
Iwaba also produces and sells top-of-the-range wigs which sell from R500 up to R9 000. Her clients range from low-income buyers to high-spenders.
After obtaining her graphic design diploma at the DUT, she worked as a graphic designer for five companies between 2002 and 2020 before venturing into business. From 2011 she ran hair salons in Pietermaritzburg and Johannesburg and a bed and breakfast facility in Durban.
Her informal training in wig manufacturing gave birth to Iwaba.
While she was running a salon, in 2014 she enrolled for a hairdressing course at the L'oreal Institute, a French company, and obtained a certificate.
“I then wrote my trade test with the Services SETA (Sector Education and Training Authority), which gave me a license in hairdressing.
“And then L'oreal enrolled me for an assessor or moderator (course), so I am a qualified and registered assessor, which means basically I am a teacher and my subject matter is hair,” she said.
Ngidi then worked at L'oreal for a year before being recruited in 2017 by the Department of Social Development in Gauteng to start and run a project to empower and skill girls in disadvantaged communities in order to remove them from the South African Social Security Agency (SASSA) grants.
“We would train them for six months and place them at salons or the department would give us funds to open salons for them,” she said.
She then left the department to open Iwaba. While she was busy with Iwaba, L'oreal called her back to work as a national education manager, and she has been travelling across the country providing training and around learning new skills.
Recently she visited L'oreal’s head office in Paris where she for further training, “because L'oreal wants to work a lot with Africa.”
In case you have been retrenched don’t succumb to the despair because Ngidi and Iwaba are there to give you a new start in life as a business owner.